xargs

xargs lets you chain together and patch up results from piped commands into other commands or applications.

$ find "start/path" -name "filename.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 -o vim
$ git branch --merged | egrep -v "(^\*|master|main|dev|staging)" | xargs git branch -d

It is invoked like xargs [option...] [command [initial-arguments]]. For instance, the end result of that first example would be vim {result of find command}, and the end result of the second would be git branch -d {result of egrep on results of git command}.

Options

$ xargs -0 --max-args=2

-0: Use \0 as the delimiter, which is useful for filenames with spaces. Ensure piped command delimits using \0 and not spaces.
-d delim: Use delim as your delimiter between arguments
-E eof-str: Use eof-str as the signifier of end of file. When found, all following text is ignored.
-n max-args: Use at most max-args arguments per command line.
-o: Allow interactive programs to access pipe output. e.g. find "start/path" -name "filename.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 -o vim. This will send the filename found with find as the argument to vim.

Simple Version

You can do simple xargs recipes in shell using command substitution:

$ # xargs version
$ find "start/path" -name "filename.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 -o vim
$ # shell versions
$ vim `find "start/path" -name "filename.txt"`
$ vim $(find "start/path" -name "filename.txt")

References

Incoming Links

Last modified: 202401040446